"It's true," a friend who has lived here for more than a decade insisted. "Because for them it's the most important mountain in the world, Japanese schoolchildren don't draw Mount Fuji the sloping shape it really is, but as incredibly tall and pointed."
I've got news for my friend: On the evidence of "Mountain Scenes -- The Beauty of Eastern Japan," it's not just schoolchildren but some of this country's best-known artists who have a perspective problem with Japan's most famous peak. The show, at the Tokyo Station Gallery, contains 63 works, 60 of which were commissioned specially.
At 3,776 meters high, Mount Fuji is no mere bump on the horizon, but the opening work in the exhibition -- "Fuji -- Violet Vision," a 2-meter tall canvas by Tokihiko Adachi -- swells it to Himalayan proportions. The indigo mountain looms impassively above a yellow streak of sunlit meadow and a blue lake in the foreground. On the edge of the water, painted as tiny dabs of white and red so insignificant they barely register, are houses -- putting humanity in its place in nature's vast scheme of things.